The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [112]
The case was overstated. I was not alarmed. The Socialist continued to express its resentment, but it seemed that that was all we could do. How can you negotiate about something whose value you don’t know? To all our official approaches the companies replied with unofficial invitations. I believe some of the managers changed in my time, but the barbecue, family atmosphere remained the same and our conversations were the same. The companies didn’t want to be rude to us. We were a new country and so on, and they were in our life and part of it – the theme of their soft-sell advertisements in our newspapers – but their line was that there was nothing to discuss. And we couldn’t do a thing. There was no question of calling out the workers to support us. We had no control of that union. Besides, the companies’ workers were the best-paid in Isabella – there was a continuous scramble for jobs with them – and so far as things like housing and recreation facilities went, they were model employers. So there we were. Another message to be taken back to the people, another exercise in leadership.
We were saved by Jamaica. They had more resources, a more experienced and energetic government, and more international contacts. They too had been exercised about their getting their bauxite, so easy to mine, renegotiated; and at last they seemed to be getting somewhere. We merely followed their example and advice. The barbecue parties stopped. Instead we were photographed with our aides in a conference room, amid blank blotters and carafes and tumblers. We all looked stern and businesslike. From their advertisements, no one was happier than the companies.
It was a triumph. It was the peak of my political achievement. After this descent was to be rapid.
The smaller the society the more complex the issues: the hostilities and alignments in a parliament of six hundred are more easy to follow than those in a parish council of twenty. To me even now there is only a sequence of events. Everyone’s motives remain unclear, and I doubt whether an impartial commission of inquiry will establish more than confusion, leading cloudily to a resolution of some sort. I am sure that motives and alliances shifted rapidly in the month after the renegotiating of the bauxite contract. Crunch-time was near; there was alarm and nervousness.
Coinciding with the flight of the Czech whose plastic stank, coinciding with the jubilation and publicity over the new bauxite contract, there occurred a great and continuing disturbance throughout the Stockwell sugar estates, which our police force for almost a week was powerless to control.
See how the first two events had me as their centre; see how jumpiness linked me to the third. It was a movement of Asiatics, so cool to the idea of sharing distress. It was the first serious challenge to order we had had to face, and we recognized it as a show of true strength. It was the crop season. Ripe canes stood in the fields waiting to be cut; the loss from arson was immense. See how quickly jumpiness turned to alarm; see how many interpretations could be put on this disturbance, which at first seemed so unmanageable. See how many ways of action suggested themselves to men who distrusted each other and saw their own power as nothing more than bluff. There was the desire to win over and control this suddenly displayed strength; there was the desire to destroy it. There was talk of exploitation and absentee landlords; at the same time, here and there in towns, there were demonstrations of counter-violence, totally racial in character.
I was at the centre of events